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Swiftly
It is 1848 and the British Empire has grown rich exploiting Lilliputian slaves—the finesse of their working allowing unheard of feats of miniature engineering; even Babbage's computing device has been made to work. But now the French have formed a regiment of previously peaceful Brobdingnagian giants and invasion looms. In a world where humanity is both smaller and larger than it once was, love and hate loom large. Mankind discovers itself at the center of scale. Lilliptians are 12 times smaller than us but there are those 12 times smaller than them, and 12 times smaller again and so on. And the scale of being goes up from Swift's giants, as well. This Wellesian sequel to Gulliver's Travels is a unique piece of sci-fi literature.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
7 people are currently reading
218 people want to read
About the author
Adam Roberts
258 books556 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Adam Roberts (born 1965) is an academic, critic and novelist. He also writes parodies under the pseudonyms of A.R.R.R. Roberts, A3R Roberts and Don Brine. He also blogs at The Valve, a group blog devoted to literature and cultural studies.
He has a degree in English from the University of Aberdeen and a PhD from Cambridge University on Robert Browning and the Classics. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Adam Roberts has been nominated twice for the Arthur C. Clarke Award: in 2001, for his debut novel, Salt, and in 2007, for Gradisil.
Adam Roberts (born 1965) is an academic, critic and novelist. He also writes parodies under the pseudonyms of A.R.R.R. Roberts, A3R Roberts and Don Brine. He also blogs at The Valve, a group blog devoted to literature and cultural studies.
He has a degree in English from the University of Aberdeen and a PhD from Cambridge University on Robert Browning and the Classics. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Adam Roberts has been nominated twice for the Arthur C. Clarke Award: in 2001, for his debut novel, Salt, and in 2007, for Gradisil.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
September 13, 2020
Everything that happened in Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was real. The little people – the Lilliputians. The giants- the Bromdingnagians. The talking horses. All of it.
This is the starting point of Adam Robert’s very aptly named Swiftly, set in a Britain where the discovery of the marvelous southern isles that Gulliver visited has utterly changed the nineteenth century, for better and mostly for worse.
If you’ve read any Roberts, (and you really should – I rate him as one of the major living talents in SF) you’ll know that he is an absolute master of the concept novel. Each of his books is built around a brilliant idea that is fleshed out into convincing beautiful, and often menacing worlds, and I rate many of his books as important works in Science Fiction.
And so it is here, well… almost.
Gulliver’s travels have remade his world. Technology has leapt forward, spurred by the intricate clockwork workings created by enslaved Lilliputians, who labour in factories across the UK. Tiny flying machines zip around London delivering messages, while rumours abound that the French, with their own tiny assistants, have built a computational machine. Across the continent colossal Bromdingnagians tend their equally colossal cows, the meat from these giant beasts banishing the spectre of starvation from Europe.
In true Roberts’ style, all of this is shown in living, breathing, convincing detail, subtly drawn and artfully constructed.
We begin with Abraham, a slightly louche advocate for the abolition of little-people slavery, ineffectively trying to convince a factory owner to free his tiny chattels, and then move to a young woman who ends up betrothed to that very enslaving industrialist, all the while catching glimpses of an otherworldly London in the background.
In a matter of chapters we are amidst a brutal war, one side deploying corps of giants, the other cavalry regiments of talking horses in a conflict whose stakes eventually rise to encompass the whole of Human civilization.
When I began Swiftly, I was quickly caught up in the concept and its brilliance, and then sucked along by Robert’s skill with character and setting. I really thought I would love it but…
Overall, the effect of the novel as a whole is more Lilliputian than Bromdingnagian. While the central conceit is brilliant (and starts the story off in some very interesting directions) things bog down a bit in parts, and the relationship between the two main characters drags, almost into tedium at times. I found myself skipping ahead to see how long these sections were, and feeling disheartened at the pages ahead of me.
Toward the end this torpor dissipates. The final chapters hurtle along at a pace that contrasts strangely with some of the slower middle sections, and while the story goes in some very conceptually interesting directions, and makes a nice nod to H.G Wells, the ending is underwhelming and unsatisfying. It feels rushed, and to my eye it jars with the rest of the story.
Roberts has written great novels. Stone, New Modern Army, and Jack Glass are three where his marriage of story and concept produce novels of pure diamond brilliance. Swiftly doesn’t scale these heights. None of Robert’s books could ever be called boring, but while Swiftly is still largely enjoyable, it doesn’t stand out in his stellar catalogue.
Three cunningly wrought nineteenth-century literary references out of five.
This is the starting point of Adam Robert’s very aptly named Swiftly, set in a Britain where the discovery of the marvelous southern isles that Gulliver visited has utterly changed the nineteenth century, for better and mostly for worse.
If you’ve read any Roberts, (and you really should – I rate him as one of the major living talents in SF) you’ll know that he is an absolute master of the concept novel. Each of his books is built around a brilliant idea that is fleshed out into convincing beautiful, and often menacing worlds, and I rate many of his books as important works in Science Fiction.
And so it is here, well… almost.
Gulliver’s travels have remade his world. Technology has leapt forward, spurred by the intricate clockwork workings created by enslaved Lilliputians, who labour in factories across the UK. Tiny flying machines zip around London delivering messages, while rumours abound that the French, with their own tiny assistants, have built a computational machine. Across the continent colossal Bromdingnagians tend their equally colossal cows, the meat from these giant beasts banishing the spectre of starvation from Europe.
In true Roberts’ style, all of this is shown in living, breathing, convincing detail, subtly drawn and artfully constructed.
We begin with Abraham, a slightly louche advocate for the abolition of little-people slavery, ineffectively trying to convince a factory owner to free his tiny chattels, and then move to a young woman who ends up betrothed to that very enslaving industrialist, all the while catching glimpses of an otherworldly London in the background.
In a matter of chapters we are amidst a brutal war, one side deploying corps of giants, the other cavalry regiments of talking horses in a conflict whose stakes eventually rise to encompass the whole of Human civilization.
When I began Swiftly, I was quickly caught up in the concept and its brilliance, and then sucked along by Robert’s skill with character and setting. I really thought I would love it but…
Overall, the effect of the novel as a whole is more Lilliputian than Bromdingnagian. While the central conceit is brilliant (and starts the story off in some very interesting directions) things bog down a bit in parts, and the relationship between the two main characters drags, almost into tedium at times. I found myself skipping ahead to see how long these sections were, and feeling disheartened at the pages ahead of me.
Toward the end this torpor dissipates. The final chapters hurtle along at a pace that contrasts strangely with some of the slower middle sections, and while the story goes in some very conceptually interesting directions, and makes a nice nod to H.G Wells, the ending is underwhelming and unsatisfying. It feels rushed, and to my eye it jars with the rest of the story.
Roberts has written great novels. Stone, New Modern Army, and Jack Glass are three where his marriage of story and concept produce novels of pure diamond brilliance. Swiftly doesn’t scale these heights. None of Robert’s books could ever be called boring, but while Swiftly is still largely enjoyable, it doesn’t stand out in his stellar catalogue.
Three cunningly wrought nineteenth-century literary references out of five.
August 18, 2009
feels like an opportunity to develop the story from eleanor's pov rather than bates' was lost - i found her more interesting by far - but that's a minor quibble in an otherwise impressive book. the spaceship was annoying but the afterword helped.
June 28, 2019
7 I was of two minds about this book. At the start I was really engaged, but then my attention began to waver and it became a slog to wade through - this was mainly because of the chapter focusing on Eleanor and her arranged marriage to an industrialist, their 'relation' (or lack thereof) and the consummation thereof written about in too much detail. The other main character, Abraham Bates, is a bit more interesting, but in the middle part his focus on his impure thoughts (his fetish also described with a lot of details, which could maybe have been more subtle) distracted from my attention. So up till about halfway through the book I intended to award this only three stars. But then the second half picks up speed, with more adventure, narrow escapes and well thought out speculation, ending in a big (literally) climax with a lot of the 'sense of wonder' I hope to find in SF thrown in. So that was easily four stars.
It must be said that Roberts writes well, with a great vocabulary. Here he enters the victorian milieu with gusto, helped with his understanding of the period gained by his profession as a professor in Victorian culture. It made the world building very believable (even if aspects of the world, such as the racism, are not very palatable to modern audiences). Also the elements from 'Gullivers Travels' (that's why the book is called Swiftly) are incorporated in ingenuous ways. The lilliputians, the Brobdingnagians, the Houyhnhnms, the island of Laputa and more - they all have their role to play. And Roberts uses the concepts Swift used in a satirical way as elements for science fictional speculation - on size, the nature of matter and the cosmos. Fascinating stuff. And in the end even the at first not very sympathetic characters gain humanity and become heroes (well, kind of). I did feel for them in the end, but it took a long time coming.
So, in short, this was another one of Roberts high concept books, with a relatively simple idea (here: what if the Islands from Gullivers Travels were real?) taken to its extremes in a satisfying way, but with another Roberts' staple: quite unsympathetic characters, keeping the reader at an emotional distance, at least for part of the novel. I do wonder if Roberts wants to be too clever in playing his speculative games on the reader, almost daring them to stay away from his work. I will read more of Roberts' books, because of the awesome ideas he showcases, but with a bit of trepidation. I think it's an acquired taste ...
Strange Horizons has a great review of this book: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fictio...
It must be said that Roberts writes well, with a great vocabulary. Here he enters the victorian milieu with gusto, helped with his understanding of the period gained by his profession as a professor in Victorian culture. It made the world building very believable (even if aspects of the world, such as the racism, are not very palatable to modern audiences). Also the elements from 'Gullivers Travels' (that's why the book is called Swiftly) are incorporated in ingenuous ways. The lilliputians, the Brobdingnagians, the Houyhnhnms, the island of Laputa and more - they all have their role to play. And Roberts uses the concepts Swift used in a satirical way as elements for science fictional speculation - on size, the nature of matter and the cosmos. Fascinating stuff. And in the end even the at first not very sympathetic characters gain humanity and become heroes (well, kind of). I did feel for them in the end, but it took a long time coming.
So, in short, this was another one of Roberts high concept books, with a relatively simple idea (here: what if the Islands from Gullivers Travels were real?) taken to its extremes in a satisfying way, but with another Roberts' staple: quite unsympathetic characters, keeping the reader at an emotional distance, at least for part of the novel. I do wonder if Roberts wants to be too clever in playing his speculative games on the reader, almost daring them to stay away from his work. I will read more of Roberts' books, because of the awesome ideas he showcases, but with a bit of trepidation. I think it's an acquired taste ...
Strange Horizons has a great review of this book: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fictio...
June 19, 2014
Adam Roberts is one of my favourite Science Fiction writers and this tribute to one of the first classics of the genre only increases this enthusiasm. Swiftly explores the themes of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a story well known and loved by many. Here we see the tiny Lilliputians and the gigantic Brobdingnagians joining forces with the French army to invade and conquer Great Britain. A clever premise that in itself is enough to garner interest, but as with many of Roberts’ novels, there is much more here than meets the eye.
Themes of unrequited love, theology, fetishism, loss and mental health issues are thrown into what becomes a heady thought provoking mix, despite the fantastical set up. This is what makes Roberts such a clever writer. It verges on the brilliant, that he can take a classic Science Fiction premise and compel the reader to stop and think, to ask their own questions of the subjects touched upon.
One defining feature is the unpleasant nature of the characters, in fact nearly every character here is obnoxious, only the Brobdingnagians seem to have any redeeming features. Supporting characters like the oppressed Lilliputians and Bates’ new found friend, The Dean of York are equally as despicable as the two main protagonists
The male protagonist Abraham Bates, is a deeply flawed individual, troubled by his depression and disillusionment with the world, he becomes a reluctant spectator to the apparent destruction of the human race and the Earth itself. He is consumed with jealousy throughout and struggles to come to terms with some rather unpleasant sexual urges and fetishes. He thinks of himself as devoid of all morality and a sinner against God, despite his faith being the one thing that does not falter throughout the trials and tribulations he faces. His problems only deepen when he falls hopelessly in love with a women who can never truly love him in return.
Eleanor Burton, the female protagonist, and the subject of Abraham Bates’ unrequited love, is a very cold and spiteful women, with no concept of love whatsoever. Her story begins with her marriage to a much older man whom she secretly despises, which actually makes you sympathise with her, but as the novel continues, she starts to show that she is perhaps as equally flawed as Abraham. Her subsequent action are often deplorable and morally wrong.
As I got further and further into reading Swiftly, it became increasingly apparent that this book displays Adam Roberts’ obvious affection for the past masters and classic tales of his chosen genre. Indeed Jonathan Swift’s seminal work is not the only influence you begin to notice. H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and Voltaire’s Micromégas are subtle influences as well. The afterword confirms this, as Roberts talks about his influences. Here is a writer with a true love of the genre, he is also an exceptional talent and this book only serves to reinforce that assertion.
Themes of unrequited love, theology, fetishism, loss and mental health issues are thrown into what becomes a heady thought provoking mix, despite the fantastical set up. This is what makes Roberts such a clever writer. It verges on the brilliant, that he can take a classic Science Fiction premise and compel the reader to stop and think, to ask their own questions of the subjects touched upon.
One defining feature is the unpleasant nature of the characters, in fact nearly every character here is obnoxious, only the Brobdingnagians seem to have any redeeming features. Supporting characters like the oppressed Lilliputians and Bates’ new found friend, The Dean of York are equally as despicable as the two main protagonists
The male protagonist Abraham Bates, is a deeply flawed individual, troubled by his depression and disillusionment with the world, he becomes a reluctant spectator to the apparent destruction of the human race and the Earth itself. He is consumed with jealousy throughout and struggles to come to terms with some rather unpleasant sexual urges and fetishes. He thinks of himself as devoid of all morality and a sinner against God, despite his faith being the one thing that does not falter throughout the trials and tribulations he faces. His problems only deepen when he falls hopelessly in love with a women who can never truly love him in return.
Eleanor Burton, the female protagonist, and the subject of Abraham Bates’ unrequited love, is a very cold and spiteful women, with no concept of love whatsoever. Her story begins with her marriage to a much older man whom she secretly despises, which actually makes you sympathise with her, but as the novel continues, she starts to show that she is perhaps as equally flawed as Abraham. Her subsequent action are often deplorable and morally wrong.
As I got further and further into reading Swiftly, it became increasingly apparent that this book displays Adam Roberts’ obvious affection for the past masters and classic tales of his chosen genre. Indeed Jonathan Swift’s seminal work is not the only influence you begin to notice. H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and Voltaire’s Micromégas are subtle influences as well. The afterword confirms this, as Roberts talks about his influences. Here is a writer with a true love of the genre, he is also an exceptional talent and this book only serves to reinforce that assertion.
August 23, 2013
Continuing the world of Gulliver's Travels into the Victorian era seems like such a natural idea I'm surprised no one has done it before. Roberts neatly fits Gulliver's new world into the narrative of empire, another land to be conquered and used alongside so many others. The Lilliputians are slave artisans, building impossibly tiny Steampunk devices with the precision machines at that time could only dream of. The Brobdingnagian are nearly exterminated by the Royal Navy, and ally with the French.
Adam Roberts gets a lot of credit in my book for not stopping there. Instead he takes Swift's premise of big and little and pushes it out in both directions, below the naked eye and out into space. The result is a fascinating idea, even if I don't think it quite succeeded as a novel.
Swiftly is daring, creative, but in dire need of a firmer narrative hand.
April 8, 2017
I always enjoy Adam Roberts' ideas and writing, but I can't help but wish sometimes that he would actually take a bit longer between novels to properly develop them. Too many of his books are great ideas that are only taken so far because his short attention span seems to have already taken him onto his next project. This is the best example of this problem: you're barely half-way through reading it before you already get the sense that he's rushing to get it over with so he can start writing something else. I liked the core concepts, liked the characters, and liked the prose style. I would have loved a more ambitious and carefully thought-out plot, and a bit of time and space for the ideas to breathe.
February 1, 2017
Adam Roberts is one of my favourite contemporary SF authors - but, for me, Swiftly is his weakest book I've read. As usual with Roberts this is an exploration of an audacious idea - in this case, we are in a world where the various species from Swift's Gulliver's Travels (see what he did with the title?) are real and encroaching on business and life in Victorian Britain. Of itself this is wonderfully imagined - the abuse, for example of Lilliputians (or their neighbours Blefuscudians, who have to repeatedly point out they aren't Lilliputians) to perform extremely detailed work in factories is brilliant. And the employment in war by the French of giants from Brobdingnag who reluctantly help them to partially conquer the UK, helped by Babbage engines with a twist, is equally clever.
However, Roberts also introduces other layers, going bigger and smaller than Swift's variants, with a destructive ultra giant in a spaceship and a plague caused by tiny creatures that wipes out large swathes of humanity. As is almost always the case with disaster stories, the result is a depersonalisation of the storyline where I find it hard to identify much with what's going on. And though the main characters survive the plague, they too remain a little distant and untouchable, in part because Roberts in probably trying to give them period sensibilities, which mix with some more modern viewpoints that sit a little uncomfortably. In the end, the latter part of the book, a seemingly endless trek from London to York for what felt like no good reason, dragged a lot. I'm glad I read Swiftly, but I can't imagine reading it again, where most of Roberts' books are high on my list for repeated consumption.
However, Roberts also introduces other layers, going bigger and smaller than Swift's variants, with a destructive ultra giant in a spaceship and a plague caused by tiny creatures that wipes out large swathes of humanity. As is almost always the case with disaster stories, the result is a depersonalisation of the storyline where I find it hard to identify much with what's going on. And though the main characters survive the plague, they too remain a little distant and untouchable, in part because Roberts in probably trying to give them period sensibilities, which mix with some more modern viewpoints that sit a little uncomfortably. In the end, the latter part of the book, a seemingly endless trek from London to York for what felt like no good reason, dragged a lot. I'm glad I read Swiftly, but I can't imagine reading it again, where most of Roberts' books are high on my list for repeated consumption.
August 25, 2012
As I reflect on my lack of enjoyment of this novel, I find myself thinking that I really should have learned that Adam Roberts didn't deliver before I recently read 'By Light Alone'. Both books share the same elements: very interesting concepts, great hype, extremely poor execution particularly in the final section. I won't be reading another Roberts book, which saddens me given that his books get such incredible reviews and ratings in SciFi magazines like SFX. Like all of Roberts' paperbacks, the covers are beautiful & look great on a bookshelf... what a great shame that the content is so conversely unattractive.
June 4, 2009
As Kelly said "this is a total wreck of a story". The flow of the book starts pulling you in after about 230 pages and seem to be alright for a long time, but at the very end the story fails completely.
March 9, 2015
Very predictable in a cold hearted Columbus meets the Lilliputians and sells them to industrialists sort of child labor caught in the gears for profit sort of a way. Taken to the extreme of taming the third world. Very enjoyable.
June 30, 2011
This sort of sequel to Gulliver's Travels wasn't really my cup of Lilliputian.
April 3, 2014
Just one of those stories that didn't appeal to me right from the start. Sorry.
February 12, 2025
4.5 Stars
My favorite of the early Roberts novels I've read. A very readable and entertaining mashup of Swift, Eliot, Verne, Voltaire, Wells, and probably others I didn't recognize.
My favorite of the early Roberts novels I've read. A very readable and entertaining mashup of Swift, Eliot, Verne, Voltaire, Wells, and probably others I didn't recognize.
April 25, 2015
I just read a book by Roberts that I loved (By Light Alone), and this is, in many ways, the steampunk/19th century alt!history novel I have been looking for -- one written by a professor of Victorian Culture. Roberts knows his time period. But while I liked it, I didn't love it, and towards the end, I figured out why: though it's set in the 19th century, it's in many ways replicating the *18th* century novel of its Swiftian origins.
Set in 1848, Swiftly takes place in a world where the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels are not only real, but have been enslaved. The protagonist, Abraham Bates, wants freedom for the enslaved little and big people (alas, his attitudes towards the dark-skinned is less progressive), the Lilliputians & Blefescuans are invaluable in manufacturing because of their small size and the fine work they can do, and the giants are valuable for heavy lifting, construction, and warfare. When Bates learns that the French plan to invade England and set the slaves free on behalf of the Pope, he allies himself with them in order to reach his abolitionist goals . . . and of course, the French turn out to be less interested in liberation than in conquest.
Eleanor Burton, the other protagonist, appears at first to be the young heroine of so much steampunk fiction -- forced by her mother to marry for money, she loves science and technology about all things. But Eleanor is *not* the typical steampunk heroine -- she does not escape dressed as a boy and get to make cool things aboard an airship. Instead, her unhappy marriage becomes the centerpiece of the book's second section. At the same time, though her choices are limited, she's not the oppressed victim of many Victorian and neoVictorian novels, either, and she becomes increasingly unsympathetic in her behavior, which led me to a useful questioning of my own assumptions, but also made it hard to sympathize.
It's after that, when the two unite with the not-very-ecclesiastical Anglican Dean of York on an expedition to the North of England that involves a super-canon constructed by Eleanor's late father and a Babbage-ian computer powered by Lilliputians, that the novel takes a turn I was less than engaged by. The three major characters shout and scream and don't listen to each other very much, the Dean's "snuff" (clearly, he's unknowingly addicted to cocaine) leads to erratic behavior, and there's a great deal of excremental humor that would have been at home in the 18th century but very much not in Victorian England (although in this alternate 1848, England has a King). It's rollicking and fun and rather like reading science fiction by Tobias Smollett -- but not so much to my taste.
In the novel's later sections, there's a fascinating extrapolation based on Voltaire's reading of Swift. Bates gets to know a Lilliputian, sorry, Blefescuan, and Eleanor a Brobdingagian giant, and the germ theory of disease gets a period-appropriate look-in. I like that Eleanor and Abraham are neither especially likable, nor 21st century characters in 19th century dress. There's so much knowledge behind it -- sometimes steampunk and 19th century alt!history are written by people who know a great deal less about the period that I do (it was my field in grad school), and I do a lot of eyerolling. Instead, this is from an author who knows both the 18th and 19th century backgrounds well, and my personal disappointment comes from the fact that I'm more of a Dickens & Collins & Bronte fan than a Swift & Smollett & Fielding one; there's some good critique of the period and its politics here but it sometimes gets a bit lost in the absurdity. I was hoping this would take its place by Gibson & Sterling's The Difference Engine among my personal favorites, and it won't, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's a very smart book and that there's a lot of interesting stuff going on here.
Set in 1848, Swiftly takes place in a world where the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels are not only real, but have been enslaved. The protagonist, Abraham Bates, wants freedom for the enslaved little and big people (alas, his attitudes towards the dark-skinned is less progressive), the Lilliputians & Blefescuans are invaluable in manufacturing because of their small size and the fine work they can do, and the giants are valuable for heavy lifting, construction, and warfare. When Bates learns that the French plan to invade England and set the slaves free on behalf of the Pope, he allies himself with them in order to reach his abolitionist goals . . . and of course, the French turn out to be less interested in liberation than in conquest.
Eleanor Burton, the other protagonist, appears at first to be the young heroine of so much steampunk fiction -- forced by her mother to marry for money, she loves science and technology about all things. But Eleanor is *not* the typical steampunk heroine -- she does not escape dressed as a boy and get to make cool things aboard an airship. Instead, her unhappy marriage becomes the centerpiece of the book's second section. At the same time, though her choices are limited, she's not the oppressed victim of many Victorian and neoVictorian novels, either, and she becomes increasingly unsympathetic in her behavior, which led me to a useful questioning of my own assumptions, but also made it hard to sympathize.
It's after that, when the two unite with the not-very-ecclesiastical Anglican Dean of York on an expedition to the North of England that involves a super-canon constructed by Eleanor's late father and a Babbage-ian computer powered by Lilliputians, that the novel takes a turn I was less than engaged by. The three major characters shout and scream and don't listen to each other very much, the Dean's "snuff" (clearly, he's unknowingly addicted to cocaine) leads to erratic behavior, and there's a great deal of excremental humor that would have been at home in the 18th century but very much not in Victorian England (although in this alternate 1848, England has a King). It's rollicking and fun and rather like reading science fiction by Tobias Smollett -- but not so much to my taste.
In the novel's later sections, there's a fascinating extrapolation based on Voltaire's reading of Swift. Bates gets to know a Lilliputian, sorry, Blefescuan, and Eleanor a Brobdingagian giant, and the germ theory of disease gets a period-appropriate look-in. I like that Eleanor and Abraham are neither especially likable, nor 21st century characters in 19th century dress. There's so much knowledge behind it -- sometimes steampunk and 19th century alt!history are written by people who know a great deal less about the period that I do (it was my field in grad school), and I do a lot of eyerolling. Instead, this is from an author who knows both the 18th and 19th century backgrounds well, and my personal disappointment comes from the fact that I'm more of a Dickens & Collins & Bronte fan than a Swift & Smollett & Fielding one; there's some good critique of the period and its politics here but it sometimes gets a bit lost in the absurdity. I was hoping this would take its place by Gibson & Sterling's The Difference Engine among my personal favorites, and it won't, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's a very smart book and that there's a lot of interesting stuff going on here.
December 14, 2015
I’m going to call this literary, and that’s going to get me into trouble. We rail against the tedious taxonomic classification of books, especially using such an emotive term, connoted with superiority. No doubt this hypocrisy on my part will plunge like a Lilliputian dagger into the eyes of various readers, but it stands, because you know exactly what I mean. By small conveniences do we aggravate one another.
Swiftly is an expansion of Robert’s short story of the same name, an ingenious extrapolation of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. It is 144 years after Gulliver returned home, Britain and France are at war, and the marvellous creatures Gulliver encountered have been inevitably subdued and enslaved by the European powers.
There are many areas where the book excels. Its description of a world made wondrous by the advent of Brobdignagian sheep, talking cavalry and Lilliputian craftsmen whose tiny hands allow them to construct fantastical machines is entrancing, the middle act is an amusingly apt rebuke to the 19th century romantic novel, and in the final stages we are treated to an imaginative dissection of Swiftly‘s multi-scalar universe.
Less successful is the book’s theme on the worthiness of a man to be loved. Roberts goes too far in his abasement of his protagonist Abraham Bates; among many other penances, he makes Bates a coprophiliac who loathes his own arousal. Admittedly, Roberts does nothing without reason – Bates’ peccadilloes illustrate the gloriously physical reality of love, furthering the story’s debunking of Victorian romantic myth, and it forms a sly scatalogical adjunct to the book’s discourse on scale and corruption. But Bates begins with indignity already heaped upon him, and to have him have to redeem himself through yet more indignity seems suffering for suffering’s sake. It’s almost Catholic, and Bates is no Christ.
Yet this is a small criticism. The book fully takes up the beat of Swift’s drum on the contrariness of human nobility, and Roberts cleverly carries on the mode of reversal that the original book employs. We have the Houyhnhnms, the most rational of Swift’s creations, recast as broken beasts of burden, the simple Brobdignagians forced to fight as soldiers, and arrogant Europeans compelled to embrace their own insignificance. Finally, Bates finds peace within his own grubby world, whereas Gulliver did not.
It’s a good taste of Roberts’ work, sporting many of his tropes: Bates is flawed; a naive, depressive idealist who betrays his country; there’s an antagonistic supporting character in the shape of the cocaine-addled Dean of York; a number of obstructive, ambivalent authority figures; a difficult journey on foot, and a war which our hero has little stomach for. It’s not a retreading of old ground, however. These are merely some of the authors’ favourite stage-settings, and he knows how to employ them well.
Swiftly is probably the most accessible of Roberts’ books to date too. Besides the readership’s obvious familiarity of the source material, his prose has found an agreeable balance in its literary flourish, and his three main characters, though still Robertsian in their flaws and peculiarities, are easy to befriend. The narrative loses some of its steam towards the end, but, like the Brobdignagians, the book has a big heart.
He writes an intimate book, Roberts, and you get the feeling his characters must suffer so much because he believes himself, not them, unworthy. I suspect that when Roberts’ confidence grows a little, we will see a truly great, rather than merely excellent, work from this fascinating author.
Swiftly is an expansion of Robert’s short story of the same name, an ingenious extrapolation of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. It is 144 years after Gulliver returned home, Britain and France are at war, and the marvellous creatures Gulliver encountered have been inevitably subdued and enslaved by the European powers.
There are many areas where the book excels. Its description of a world made wondrous by the advent of Brobdignagian sheep, talking cavalry and Lilliputian craftsmen whose tiny hands allow them to construct fantastical machines is entrancing, the middle act is an amusingly apt rebuke to the 19th century romantic novel, and in the final stages we are treated to an imaginative dissection of Swiftly‘s multi-scalar universe.
Less successful is the book’s theme on the worthiness of a man to be loved. Roberts goes too far in his abasement of his protagonist Abraham Bates; among many other penances, he makes Bates a coprophiliac who loathes his own arousal. Admittedly, Roberts does nothing without reason – Bates’ peccadilloes illustrate the gloriously physical reality of love, furthering the story’s debunking of Victorian romantic myth, and it forms a sly scatalogical adjunct to the book’s discourse on scale and corruption. But Bates begins with indignity already heaped upon him, and to have him have to redeem himself through yet more indignity seems suffering for suffering’s sake. It’s almost Catholic, and Bates is no Christ.
Yet this is a small criticism. The book fully takes up the beat of Swift’s drum on the contrariness of human nobility, and Roberts cleverly carries on the mode of reversal that the original book employs. We have the Houyhnhnms, the most rational of Swift’s creations, recast as broken beasts of burden, the simple Brobdignagians forced to fight as soldiers, and arrogant Europeans compelled to embrace their own insignificance. Finally, Bates finds peace within his own grubby world, whereas Gulliver did not.
It’s a good taste of Roberts’ work, sporting many of his tropes: Bates is flawed; a naive, depressive idealist who betrays his country; there’s an antagonistic supporting character in the shape of the cocaine-addled Dean of York; a number of obstructive, ambivalent authority figures; a difficult journey on foot, and a war which our hero has little stomach for. It’s not a retreading of old ground, however. These are merely some of the authors’ favourite stage-settings, and he knows how to employ them well.
Swiftly is probably the most accessible of Roberts’ books to date too. Besides the readership’s obvious familiarity of the source material, his prose has found an agreeable balance in its literary flourish, and his three main characters, though still Robertsian in their flaws and peculiarities, are easy to befriend. The narrative loses some of its steam towards the end, but, like the Brobdignagians, the book has a big heart.
He writes an intimate book, Roberts, and you get the feeling his characters must suffer so much because he believes himself, not them, unworthy. I suspect that when Roberts’ confidence grows a little, we will see a truly great, rather than merely excellent, work from this fascinating author.
September 20, 2016
Adam Roberts has great ideas and this is one of his best: a tale set in an alternate Napoleonic Wars era, where the lands of Gullivers Travels are not only real, but have been exploited by the European powers. So, Lilliputians (and Blefuscans) are enslaved to make tiny machinery, Brobdignangian animals feed the hungry of Europe while the giants are put to work, French cavalry ride intelligent houhynm horses, and the British have a flying island. Not only this but the frustrated Charles Babbage has defected to the French.
For another author this would be a mere ripping yarn - eg Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, Napoleonic wars with dragons. But as a professor of the 19th century, Roberts has higher philosophical ambitions, which unfortunately he fails to pull off.
Fully the first quarter of the novel is dedicated to our impoverished heroine Eleanor, genteel and self-educated, faced with the prospect of marriage to a grubby factory owner. She knows virtually nothing about sex, and studiously researches the mystery of what men have in their underwear, and how sex is supposed to work. It's interesting to think of how much women were kept in ignorance about even their own bodies, but Roberts rather labours the point.
Once the tale of her marriage is resolved the storyline is promptly ditched, and we head off on a travelogue through war-torn lands with the frankly odious other main character, Abraham Bates. I assume we're supposed to view him as a character with noble aims who does objectionable things - including a rather revolting diversion into copraphilia and peculiar sexual fetishes. I can see the Swiftean inspiration for the gross and grotesque but other than further degrading the odious Bates, and demonstrating the ills of sexual repression in the period, I really don't see a narrative reason for it.
The philosophical idea that if there are men-like creatures bigger and smaller than us, then there could be similar creatures recursively bigger and smaller ad infinitum is an interesting one, but it all descends into a quagmire as broken and festering as the battlefields the narrative wanders through.
A valiant effort, but a mess which veers off in peculiar tangents and wastes the interesting potential at its core.
For another author this would be a mere ripping yarn - eg Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, Napoleonic wars with dragons. But as a professor of the 19th century, Roberts has higher philosophical ambitions, which unfortunately he fails to pull off.
Fully the first quarter of the novel is dedicated to our impoverished heroine Eleanor, genteel and self-educated, faced with the prospect of marriage to a grubby factory owner. She knows virtually nothing about sex, and studiously researches the mystery of what men have in their underwear, and how sex is supposed to work. It's interesting to think of how much women were kept in ignorance about even their own bodies, but Roberts rather labours the point.
Once the tale of her marriage is resolved the storyline is promptly ditched, and we head off on a travelogue through war-torn lands with the frankly odious other main character, Abraham Bates. I assume we're supposed to view him as a character with noble aims who does objectionable things - including a rather revolting diversion into copraphilia and peculiar sexual fetishes. I can see the Swiftean inspiration for the gross and grotesque but other than further degrading the odious Bates, and demonstrating the ills of sexual repression in the period, I really don't see a narrative reason for it.
The philosophical idea that if there are men-like creatures bigger and smaller than us, then there could be similar creatures recursively bigger and smaller ad infinitum is an interesting one, but it all descends into a quagmire as broken and festering as the battlefields the narrative wanders through.
A valiant effort, but a mess which veers off in peculiar tangents and wastes the interesting potential at its core.
March 31, 2016
Worked my way to page 142 and gave myself permission to quit. Interesting concept, but it went too slowly for me, lingering too long on underlining the excruciatingly dull passivity of the two protagonists, who could easily have been much more interesting. Rather than alternating scenes between these two people so we could advance in the chronology of slow-starting events, the author chose to give their entire backgrounds in two large, separate chunks one after another, raking over the same time period and major event twice, and by the time I abandoned ship just short of halfway through, their storylines had not yet intersected, making me wonder what the point was of those two blocks I just laboured through.
Might appeal to readers who like slower-moving or brooding narratives and not-necessarily-likeable characters, but not my cup of tea.
Might appeal to readers who like slower-moving or brooding narratives and not-necessarily-likeable characters, but not my cup of tea.
January 21, 2015
An interesting novel, that is set 100 years after Gulivers travels.
With some interesting ideas of what would happen in the world after Guliver's initial discovery, with the tiny people used as slave labor and the giants as soldiers in the french army.
Strangely all these great ideas are placed in the background of the plot mostly, where the major plot deals with Abraham and Eleanor.
I enjoyed if for the most part, although there were a few scenes, to which were, to use the protagonist's term, 'foul', and I am not too sure how necessary they were to the overall plot, apart from some bizarre character development.
With some interesting ideas of what would happen in the world after Guliver's initial discovery, with the tiny people used as slave labor and the giants as soldiers in the french army.
Strangely all these great ideas are placed in the background of the plot mostly, where the major plot deals with Abraham and Eleanor.
I enjoyed if for the most part, although there were a few scenes, to which were, to use the protagonist's term, 'foul', and I am not too sure how necessary they were to the overall plot, apart from some bizarre character development.
September 12, 2009
this was a good book! i learned of this author from a steampunk collection. there were two stories in here that were steampunkish, the first and last story. they were part of the same storyline and showed some promise if he were to continue to expand on that universe.
the story i disliked the most in this book was "allen meets the devil." and that is sad, because i was really into the story until the end. the end of the story was anti-climatic and a cop-out. his job as an author (to me) is to finish the story.
the story i disliked the most in this book was "allen meets the devil." and that is sad, because i was really into the story until the end. the end of the story was anti-climatic and a cop-out. his job as an author (to me) is to finish the story.
September 5, 2012
Three stars - it was an ok flintlock fantasy. The idea to extrapolate from the original Gulliver's travels is excellent, providing the for faeries and giants in a world/vs. industrialization (though nothing too new). The (main) male character is not very likable in my opinion, I found myself empathizing with the (main) female character more. The adventure element is there, though the action sequences are not predominant. The ending is what was disappointing. It felt rushed and was an "easy way out".
Read
May 22, 2016The contents is subtly disturbing, depressing, slow and repetitive. I'm just going to say that I've finished reading at page 13.. something. This book is written in a classic-English tone, inspired by Gulliver's Travels.
rejected
June 7, 2010Review from the Thought Lost List Of Books to Read. "ZZZ."
April 24, 2015
Very disappointing, I had such high hopes aswell :(
May 16, 2022
This could have been Roberts's best book, but unfortunately, it is not.
The main story plot is simply not interesting.
The relationship between Elanor and Bates is.
The main story plot is simply not interesting.
The relationship between Elanor and Bates is.
December 30, 2008
Wow. If a bad novel may be said to be a "bomb," then this book is a WMD.
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